Ippimail needs the help of the OS community

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Simon Martin writes “Ippimail.com has just gone Public Beta. Ippimail is a community based Yahoo/Gmail style email service which aims to raise $1million/day for charities across the world.

10% of everything we raise will be given back to the Open Source community.

The service is entirely free, income is derived from advertising. What makes us different is our signup questionnaire.

The signup process involves *anonymously* filling out a lengthy questionnaire, creating a detailed profile of each of our users. Using this profile we will very precisely target banner advertising at our users when they view their email. This finely tailored advertising will naturally have a particularly high value which is why we anticipate raising such large sums for good causes.

When you sign up you will be able to nominate a charity or group of charities who will benefit from the money your use of the site will generate. You can support exactly the causes you care about. You can also change your nominated charity at any time. This means the Ippimail community can respond to events such as the recent Tsunami tragedy. In an instance such as this, we could have emailed you saying something like, ‘As you are probably aware, a massive Tsunami has hit a number of countries in South East Asia. Tens of thousands have been killed, many made homeless, etc. How about we all change our nominated charities to divert funds to this disaster. ‘ At a moments notice, it can become be a bit like ‘Band Aid’.

Naturally we are not about SPAM and users’ details will never be divulged to advertisers. Having an ippimail address simply means that each email a user receives will represent one piece of advertising. Profits go to Open Source and charities.

Ippimail will forward your mail to any other address so if you are wedded to the Gmail interface you can still use an ippimail address and help raise money for good causes. A text ad will be injected into your forwarded email should you chose this option.

We need the help of the Open Source community. We hope you will see this as a project in its own right. Help us develop the service. Not only is this an opportunity to create a properly funded ‘Best of Breed’ but it’s an opportunity to evangelise Open Source (and open standards) to a group of people who may otherwise never have come across it, the general public.

Join our project. We need the best, the OS community.

http://www.ippimail.com

Link: ippimail.com